Adaptive Matching for Expert Systems with Uncertain Task Types

Overview & Synopsis

A matching in a two-sided market often incurs an externality: a matched resource maybecome unavailable to the other side of the market, at least for a while. This is especiallyan issue in online platforms involving human experts as the expert resources are often scarce.The efficient utilization of experts in these platforms is made challenging by the fact that theinformation available about the parties involved is usually limited.To address this challenge, we develop a model of a task-expert matching system where atask is matched to an expert using not only the prior information about the task but alsothe feedback obtained from the past matches. In our model the tasks arrive online while theexperts are fixed and constrained by a finite service capacity. For this model, we characterizethe maximum task resolution throughput a platform can achieve. We show that the naturalgreedy approaches where each expert is assigned a task most suitable to her skill is suboptimal,as it does not internalize the above externality. We develop a throughput optimal backpressurealgorithm which does so by accounting for the ‘congestion’ among different task types. Finally,we validate our model and confirm our theoretical findings with data-driven simulations vialogs of Math.StackExchange, a StackOverflow forum dedicated to mathematics